Course1103: Rethinking Mental Health: Between the Windscreen and the Rearview Mirror

Date: Jan 2nd- Jan 8th 2012 (10 am to 6 pm)

This course will look at two kinds of questions that need to be addressed in mental health: one, coming from the present (i.e. coming to view through the windscreen) and the other, coming from the past (i.e. coming to view through the rearview mirror). One, looking at questions the contemporary is throwing up (questions coming from neurobiology, cognition studies, disability studies, critical legal studies, critical psychology, post-Freudian approaches, qualitative/quantitative debates, public health/private health service related debates, the State-pharmaceutical continuum, incitement to discourse around mental states like stress, anorexia post-globalization, de-institutionalization, de-pathologization, informed consent, living will, ECT, client's perspective, bio-ethics etc.) and the other looking at questions the 'Indian past and bathe Indian context' throws up (questions pertaining to 'faith healing', pre/non-modern and non-western approaches to mental health, debates around 'Indian Psychology', 'Psychology in India' and 'Psychology for India', debates around the plurality of approaches like biomedical psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis, debates around institutional and community mental health) so as to see what is ideal for the patient/client/survivor and what would be the kind of (clinical/community) engagement we would strive for in the mental health setting.

This session will through class participation arrive at an inventory of the new questions and new frameworks in mental health. At least, three frameworks will be put to discussion. One, the framework of 'Critical Psychology'. Two, the framework of 'Clinical Psychology'/'Psychoanalysis'. Three, the framework of 'Cultural Psychology'. In a broad sense, the course is placed at the cusp of the 'critical'-'clinical'-'cultural' (where each in turn could be put to interrogation). In a narrower sense, the course is placed at the cusp of three thinkers, Foucault-Freud-Nandy (and through Nandy, 'Savage Freud' Girindrasekhar Bose, the first psychoanalyst in the Southern hemisphere who was in conversation with Freud and who differed with Freud on questions of 'sexuation', Oedipus Complex and castration).

In another sense, the course is about a 'critique of critique'. It is about asking: how does one reflect on a tradition of critical psychology in India? What are the problems and hurdles of such a reflection? One is of course the ‘culture question’. Is cultural psychology, critical psychology? Does the cultural turn make psychology critical? Not necessarily, because we need a further work of critique on the matrix of the cultural: ‘India’ remains to this day a divided perspective, and it becomes increasingly difficult to speak from just location or context. Conversely, do we not need a further work of culture on the extant culture of critical psychology? One perhaps needs to pass that which is already considered critical in the West through the cultural prism. The same holds true for the psychoanalytic turn in the Indian history of mental health. While the psychoanalytic perspective is a critique of mainstream psychology, the critique would require further critique – one coming from the register of culture (Girindrasekhar Bose) and the other coming from the register of critical psychology - one coming from the register of 'schizoanalysis' (see Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze-Guattari, 2004) and the other coming from the register of 'semanalysis' (see Kristeva) - one coming from 'resistances to psychoanalysis' and the other from 'Resistances of Psychoanalysis' (see Derrida, 1998).

For example, one can think of a psychoanalytic critique of mainstream (experimental or behavioral) psychology; one can then think of a feminist critique of psychoanalysis. However, feminism itself would require cultural critique and the cultural would require feminist critique. Critical-psychoanalytic-cultural-critical-psychoanalytic- … thus emerge as an interminable continuum in the course; the ‘next move’ subverts the ‘earlier moment’; the ‘earlier’ anticipates the ‘next’. Or perhaps, it is the Borromean (ir)resolution of the psychoanalytic, the cultural and the critical that awaits us.

In yet another sense, the course is about a critical reflection on three dominant idioms in contemporary mental health - (i) localization (see Foucault's Birth of the Clinic), (ii) classification-pathologisation (we have in mind the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual [DSM]) and (iii) quantification.

References:

i. Foucault, Michel (2005) The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-1982. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-41. Link Found

Session 2: Jan 2, 2012 (2 pm to 4 pm – Reading and Writing Session): Reading Foucault I: Foucault says in History of Madness “European man, since the depth of the middle ages, has had a relation with a thing that is confusedly called Madness, Dementia or Unreason” … Write on

(a) What is this ‘relation’ that the European has had with Madness, Dementia or Unreason?

Session 5: Jan 3, 2012 (2 pm to 4 pm – Reading and Writing Session): Reading Freud I: Restlessness, Phantasy and the Concept of the Mind: What is your understanding of Akrasia? Write a reflective and critical note on Akrasia? Do you agree with Jonathan Lear (on Akrasia being a constitutive feature of the human mind)?

Readings:

i. Freud, S. 1925. “A Note on the Mystic Writing Pad” in General Psychological Theory, Chapter XIII, pp. 207-212. Link foundii. Lear, J. 1998. “Restlessness, Phantasy, and the Concept of Mind” in Open Minded: Working out the Logic of the Soul, pp. 80-122. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Link Found

Erik Erikson (1970) says: "We must begin by recognizing our patients as the inverted dissenters, too sick for the modish malaise of their time, too isolated for joint dissent, and yet too sensitive for simple adjustment".

This session is a reflection on the Eriksonian anguish. It is also about contemporary debates around the 'rights' of the mentally dis-eased – for example, the paternalism vs autonomy debate. It would also be an introduction to questions of informed consent, living will, client’s perspective, bio-ethics.

iv. Davar, Bhargavi & Lokhare, Madhura (2009). Recovering from psychosocial traumas: The place of dargahs in Maharashtra. Economic and Political Weekly. Volume 44, Number 16, April 18-24, 2009. Link Found

Session 13: Jan 6, 2012 (2 pm to 5 pm): Science(s) of the Mind: Between Foucault and Freud – this session will also look at the neurobiology of dreams, discuss plasticity, and mirror neurons.

Readings:

i. “Science(s) of the Mind: Fort-Da between the Windscreen and the Rearview Mirror” in Materialism and Immaterialism In India and the West: Varying Vistas (Volume XII, Levels of Reality, Part 5 – ed. Partha Ghosh), in PROJECT OF HISTORY OF INDIAN SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE (PHISPC), General Ed. D P Chattopadhyay, 2010.